Choose Your Own Adventure (and Beyond)

Earlier this month, Mark Frauenfelder’s blog Boing Boing ran a single page from a Choose Your Own Adventure Book. It featured a wizened old man warning a naïve young traveler “that all our actions and decisions are merely the machinations of a predetermined universe and that our concept of ‘free will’ is naught but a comforting illusion.”

At the bottom, smirking ironically, the author offered: “If you agree with his hypothesis, turn to page 72. If you disagree, turn to page 72.”

In fact, the most comforting and most terrifying thing about the Choose Your Own Adventure books&#8212awful, and awe-full, in all senses of the word&#8212was that they flew in the face of this idea of fate. As a child in the eighties reading the books, this could be a blessing (was there a god watching on, dictating your actions? No! Could you eat ice cream out of the carton when no one was looking? Yes!), or a curse (if there was free will, then were you morally responsible for the series of bad choices you made along the way? The books may not have promulgated the idea of fate, but, judging by most of the endings I met, they certainly believed in fatality.) At first, for me, the series inspired the joie de vivre of complete release. Not only was there no foreordained story, but there was no predetermined physical path for your hands to wander through it. You could flip back to front (the best way, in fact, to find the winning paths), or return to the road not taken. But the more (literal) dead-ends I met, the more cruel and frightening the world of the books seemed, like a Darwinist labyrinth in which I was terrified to make any movement. (Nothing chilled the cold fires of my childhood mind like the gorgeous, sinisterly engrossing adult sibling of the Adventure books, "Maze: Solve the World’s Most Challenging Puzzle" by Christopher Manson. Put out by Henry Holt in 1985, it offered $10,000 to any reader who could solve its riddles; it took three years for anyone to collect the prize money. You can test your wile by exploring a Web version of the book’s maze online here.)

[#image: /photos/59095379019dfc3494e9e373]Bantam dropped the Choose Your Own Adventure line in 1998 (it has since been revived by Chooseco), but the ideas behind it, good and bad, persisted in another medium. With the Adventure books, you could role-play or game-play; you could hyperlink from one page to another, distant page in an instant, like a "Star Trek" character teleporting to another planet (one that, in many instances, held aliens of a dangerous nature). You could erase your tracks or track your history. As an amazingly exhaustive Web site on the books shows, they were, in fact, like early versions of the Internet.

Last week, an ingenuous Twitter user began a Twitter Choose Your Own Adventure, filled with spies and North Koreans, red wires and blue wires. There are disappointingly few possible paths, but perhaps that’s fitting for a service that allows you disappointingly few possible words. Then again, when you think about it, there’s no need to go down all those Twitter trails anyway: the most enigmatic, amazing, frighteningly irresolvable maze you’ll find is the one you think your mouse is casually strolling through right now.

Like the Adventure books, it’s a representation of reality, and a way to circumvent it.